Psycho-Aetheric Alchemy

by David Chaim Smith

In 2024 there was an upsurge of work that resulted in 11 short books. Psycho-Aetheric Alchemy, Volume 1 is what started it all. The book is not about mystical contemplation, it is a contemplative practice in-itself. Comprised of 72 short sections accompanied by a variety of visuals, the practice is accomplished by opening the pages at random in an unstructured manner. If done over a protracted period, the sections reveal their meaning uniquely in each encounter. The implications of these meanings go on forever. The book serves as a lens that focuses the trajectory of practice through esoteric symbolism, poetics, and sensations of beauty and wonder. It is not an ordinary book, even amongst David Chaim Smith’s other works.

112 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2023

About the author

David Chaim Smith was born in 1964 in Queens, New York. His early career was as a visual artist throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he began an immersion into the root sources of Alchemy and the Hermetic and Hebrew traditions of the Kabbalah. In 1996 he abandoned visual art for a total dedication to spiritual practice, from which came a unique blend of practical mysticism and creative innovation. This blend coalesced while working with an obscure thirteenth-century text called The Fountain of Wisdom, which he mapped out diagrammatically in notebooks during his ten-year hiatus from visual art. The resulting symbol vocabulary served as the basis for his 2006 return to art, generating the content for several books. He currently lives in the suburbs of New York City with his wife, Rachel.